


the corner you played in lit like a stage

by weird_bird (2weird4)



Series: more than luck [5]
Category: Batwoman (Comic), DCU (Comics), The Question (Comics)
Genre: Costumes, F/F, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-01
Updated: 2017-11-01
Packaged: 2019-01-27 01:59:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12571200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/2weird4/pseuds/weird_bird
Summary: “Comeon.I mean you’re like, pale, and there’s the whole bat thing. Also, repeating costumes is passé.”“Oh, if it’s passé, you definitely can’t do it, Katie,” Mama teases, wrapping an arm around her waist.The final part of a series where Kate and Renee adopt Jason.





	the corner you played in lit like a stage

**Author's Note:**

> title from ["the light gatherer"](https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-light-gatherer/) by carol ann duffy.
> 
> the first part is halloween-related, some other stuff is about gender-nonconforming jason, and then i tried to wrap up the themes of family in a big messy bow to close out the series. happy halloween! nothing spookier than the concept of unconditional love.
> 
> if it's unclear, renee is "mama," kate is "mom."

“Weren’t you involved with theater in high school? I bet you could help, Mama.”

“Whoa, whoa. That was stage production.” Careful not to jostle the laptop open to a YouTube tutorial or the array of makeup and costuming supplies spread over the table, Mama leans over to squint at Jasón’s face. “What does your mom need my help for, anyway? Looks good.” 

“Do you think?” Mom taps the back end of her brush on her cheek, blowing a bit of red hair out of her face.. 

Mama looks wounded. “Would I lie?” 

“Yeah,” Jasón says unfaithfully. “C’mon, Mom, lemme see the damage.” He holds out his hand, made up with brown fake fur and stick-on claws and everything, out for the hand mirror. Holding it up, he peers at his fearful lupine visage. “Wow! It does look good.” Mom has some experience with costume makeup from Batwoman’s stark face (though she hasn’t worn a fleck of it on a day-to-day basis in the time Jasón’s been part of the family), but she’s really outdone herself with this werewolf face.

“No faith in me.” Mama crosses her arms.

Mom rejoins, “No faith in _me.”_ Smiling, she ruffles his hair between the two ears on the headband buried in his hair. 

“I always had faith I’d make a great wolf, though,” Jasón reminds them. He bares his teeth at himself in the mirror. Yeah. Real good. “See? I’m great at picking out costumes. You two should go with my idea.”

That makes Mama scoff. “Look at your beautiful mother.” She cups Mom’s face in both of her hands, and Mom’s lips twitch up at one corner in that smile she seems to save up inside just for Mama. “She would make a great bloodsucker.”

Mom locks her arms and playfully wrestles against Mama, who just laughs. “I already have the fangs and the tux. Could paint more blood onto it. Maybe add a cape.”

Jasón groans and covers his face with his hands (with a light touch. He’s not messing up Mom’s hard work). “It’s so obvious! And you did it last year!” And the year before that, according to Mama, though Jasón wasn’t there for that.

“Obvious?” Mom arches an icy brow. “Watch it, kid,” she says with humor.

“Come _on._ I mean you’re like, pale, and there’s the whole bat thing. Also, repeating costumes is passé.” 

“Oh, if it’s passé, you definitely can’t do it, Katie,” Mama teases, wrapping an arm around her waist.

Tipping her head onto her shoulder, Mom sighs. “Okay, so we’re the same size, so she can have my outfit. And we swap spit, so she can have my fangs.”

Jasón’s grumbled _ew_ doesn’t stop Mama from giving Mom a very wet kiss.. 

“But then what am I supposed to dress up as?” Mom asks.

Other arm looping around her back, Mama dips her low, grinning wide. “My very willing victim?”

Before they can get too caught up in it, Jasón interjects, “A zombie.”

Mom’s eyes light up, and Mama groans. “Great. Right in the B horror movie button,” she complains. “We’re going to be late.”

They aren’t, in fact, late. Mom whips up some wild stuff with latex and a couple colors of lipstick. It looks like real gore peeling off of her face, and she’s a nasty grey color, hair all messed up. Mama looks super dramatic in the black and white with red dripping everywhere, and she’s got makeup around her eyes and mouth that make her look different and creepy, severe slicked hair, and of course, those fangs.

“Awesome,” Jasón pronounces excitedly. “This is so awesome. We’d make the _best_ monster mashup movie.”

Mom straightens Mama’s high collar. “I’d let you bite my neck anytime,” she murmurs.

“I’d let you eat my brains,” Mama returns. _Double ew._ “How are you _still_ smoking with sh--stuff peeling off your face?”

Mom fluffs up her clumped-together hair, looking modest. 

Jasón reaches for both their hands. “Let’s go,” he says, emphatic. If they don’t soon, they’ll be gushy all night, and that’s not the kind of Halloween gross-out Jasón wants.

“In that shirt?” Mama frowns as she adjusts Jasón’s strategically-holey shirt. 

Jasón puffs out his chest. “I’m a werewolf! I busted through my shirt when I transformed, so it’s all torn.”

Mama narrows brown eyes. “You’ll catch your death of cold. I’m getting you a jacket.”

“Ma-ma!” 

“Old wives’ tales, Renee?” Mom calls after Mama as she goes to rummage in her closet.

“I’m _your_ old wife.” Returning with Jasón’s favorite red sweater, Mama drapes it around his shoulders and zips it halfway up, then gives him a hug warmer than the sweater.

“Thanks, Mama.” Jasón gives her scarred knuckles a quick squeeze.

Mama kisses him between the ears, then because she can never really resist it, flops his hood over his head. 

“Big bad wolf,” Mom says playfully, holding open the door for them and ushering them out with her zombified hand.

Shaking her head, Mama hugs him. “Little Red Riding Hood.”

_”Mama!”_

 

“No vigilantism until you’re sixteen,” Mama repeats, looking back over her shoulder at Jasón.

Jasón scowls. Crossing his arms over his abdomen, he looks out the window. “You know I could help out there.” He resists the urge to fiddle with his shiny new cartilage piercing, the constant low throb of it somehow both satisfying and irritating.

“No. We don’t.” Ouch, Mom. Blunt. “What if we did another can drive again? Or a 5k?” she suggests. 

“Come _on!_ I mean, you liked my essay, right?” 

“An arrow to the heart,” Mama says, not without humor, “but yes.” His essay, a polemic on police brutality, won him a regional prize, and as an extra treat, his mothers took him out to Mom’s favorite tattoo and piercing parlor (he already had lobes, and he wants his eyebrow next). 

“You should run for office someday. Clean up this city,” Mom tells him, making Jasón snort. “I’m serious.”

“I’d vote for you, _mijo.”_ A smile in Mama’s voice, and her eyes meet his in the rearview mirror.

“Aren’t student council elections coming up?” Mom asks with way too much interest. They let Jasón pick his school, and while they were mostly hands-off, they have occasional moments where they feel like transgressing the heteronormativity of the PTA, or something.

Jasón huffs and claims, “Um, I don’t believe in working within the system.”

 

“Hey, Mom? Do you have any unopened tubes of lipstick lying around?” Jasón pokes his head around the door. “The Batwoman red, I mean,” he clarifies, shy.

Mom, looking away from the notes she and Mama have tacked up all over the wall about their latest case, raises her eyebrows. “Top left drawer in our bedroom. Are you going out tonight?”

Jasón rolls his answer around in his head. “Yeah.”

Right past nightfall, Mama thumps around in the closet. “Have you seen my good boots?”

“Uh, maybe. Which ones are your good ones?” Mom calls back.

Jasón watches as Mama thumps Mom in the chest with a glove. “Jerkass.”

“I meant they’re _all_ your good boots.” Shit-eating grin from Mom, eyeroll from Mama. “Ready to go, Ren?”

Steeling himself, Jasón edges out of his room. “I’m ready.”

They wheel to look at him at once, Mom’s cape and Mama’s coat swirling. So maybe he has cool moms. 

Mama’s first to plant her hands on her hips. “No.”

Mom taps a finger on her lips. “Maybe.”

“Come _on.”_ Jasón spreads his hands. “I’ve done all my homework. Multiple martial arts. Forensics textbooks. Case consultations. I mean, _archival research.”_

Mama’s expression is stony. “There are other ways, Jasón.”

“You know how dangerous this is,” Mom reminds, voice low. “We wanted to give you a better life.”

“You _have._ You let me share your lives.” Jasón steps up to them, places a hand on each of their shoulders. He shot up so dizzyingly fast, he’s still not used to it. As pleased as he is to be big, to be strong, to be able to fight back, a corner of him misses the softer safety in smallness. “Let me share this, too.”

“It’s your fault vigilantism became the family business,” Mama remarks, and her grumble tells Jasón he may have won. Sighing, she turns and presses her finger onto the vivid splash of red on his chest. _”Petirrojo.”_

“It’s a bat,” Jasón corrects in confusion. His mother’s bat.

Mom exchanges a long look with Mama, a whole dialogue of love playing out between them. 

Then Mama lowers her eyes. There’s something pained in her expression, but at last, she dips her head, too, an approximation of a nod.

Jasón’s breath catches. “Really?”

“You stick with us,” Mom says, strict. “You follow the plan. You want to be part of the team, you earn it.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he says with a half-laugh. Being barked at feels like an initiation all its own.

Turning, Mama looks him up and down for a long moment. “This is the final outfit?”

Gingerly with the lipstick, Jasón presses his lips together. “Something wrong with it?” He knows--knows they wouldn’t make fun, but his heart here presses too close to his ribs, too easy to bruise. The jacket, the pants, the belt, all standard issue. Setting the thin black domino on his face--unsettlingly familiar.

Mama shrugs. “It’s just, you know, you always said you weren’t a mama’s boy.”

“He’s a _mom’s_ boy.” Mom elbows her. “He looks fantastic.”

A glow lights in his belly, and when Mama brushes the backs of her fingers across the beginnings of his stubble and says, “He looks like _you”_ he feels shining, shining.

“What’s your name, soldier?” The word pings inside. A hearkening back to something he has never lived. 

Jasón lifts his chin. “Scarlet.”

Mom thumps his back in apparent approval. “Let’s move out, Scarlet.”

Just before Mama swings her other leg out the window, she snags her gloved thumb in the contrast-colored fabric hood of his black faux-leather jacket. Then she flips it up over his head. “Red Hood.”

“I’m gonna get you for that one!” Jasón yells after her. If he can catch up. In a move he’s practiced a hundred times despite the fluidity of the first try, he throws his grapple and swings a long arc out into the night after Batwoman and the Question. Yeah. A pretty cool family.

 

“ _Scarl?”_ While Jasón’s new heads-up display is sick, he does not always enjoy seeing the notes Mama transmits shorthand from the computer. “Who the hell is Scarl?”

“You the hell is Scarl,” Mama returns, her amusement tinny.

From his left, Mom adds morosely, “At least you’re Scarl. I’m _Batwo.”_

Wincing at the doubling of her voice, he switches off her channel in a hurry. This new helmet might take some getting used to after all. He frowns to himself when he sees Mama has neatly abbreviated her own callsign as The?. __

__“Watch it!” Mom yanks him back by the collar of his long coat, but he still smacks his helmeted head off of a lamp-post._ _

__“Damnit.” He whips off his helmet and scowls down at it, head ringing._ _

__“I heard a thump. Trip on your cape?” Mama might sound jocular, but it’s hiding worry._ _

__“Nope.” Mom ruffles his hair with something like sympathy. “Your son clocked his head on a streetlight.”_ _

__“That new helmet not working out so good, huh?”_ _

__“He took it off,” Mom reports._ _

__“Yeah, yeah, yuk it up.” Jasón squints at the interior of the helmet._ _

__“Good thing we made you wear that domino, huh?”_ _

__“Yeah, _yeah.”_ _ _

__As he and Mom touch down in Crime Alley, Mama joins them._ _

__As Jasón walks forward, a chill tiptoes down his spine. Footsteps from another life. His _own._ His mothers’ suspicions about who he used to be, what had happened to him, slowly spooled out over the years as he came to stand between them as an equal. Of course he was angry at first, of course. Furious. It wrenched him to be denied his own past, a birthright at the very least._ _

__“Why?” Jasón asks, not for the first time. He asks and asks, and they answer. A conversation about displacement and belonging, though other families like theirs trade in paper and genes, not in timestreams._ _

__He was Robin. And then he wasn’t. He died in blood and agony, in darkness, in isolation. In this life, he was born again, alone. Another chance with a slate not quite wiped blank, a chalky palimpsest on the black._ _

__The mother he gave love and who gave him back only loneliness. The father he never knew and the father he knew too briefly._ _

__His mothers. Who have been through their own hells and back, who have wrought their own beginnings from bruises and rejection, who have reincarnated themselves as many times as they must to live their lives with heads held high._ _

__His mothers who never turn away, who only turn towards him._ _

__“What scared you so much?” Jasón asks in a whisper._ _

__Mama speaks first, heavy. Head lowered, hat over her faceless face. “We thought we would lose you, too.”_ _

__“If we told you--” Mom’s voice is all corners too painful to look around. “--you wouldn’t be ours anymore.”_ _

__“You act like I don’t have a choice,” Jasón says, fiery. “Don’t act like that. And you know what I would choose. I would choose _you._ I would choose the cop nearly busting me for the Batmobile tires, I would choose the camping trips and making _menudo,_ I would go through everything I had to go through if I meant I could end up right here again.” The tsunami of emotion crushes his lungs, and he breathes hard, looks away._ _

__Mama’s warm hand on his back, and Mom, nudging her masked face upwards to tip her forehead against his. “You always had a choice. We’re honored that whatever choices were made for you, you chose us.”_ _

__“_ Petirrojo.” _Mama’s fingers curl between his shoulder-blades. “You flew home to us. Our little Robin.”_ _

__“Not Robin, Mama.” Mom’s forehead is so warm against his that he doesn’t miss the helmet at all. Her smile is full of such fierce love, and he wants his smile to look like hers. He’s done playing with his past, thinking it means something for his future. He knows who he is. He is at peace.__

____

__Mom pulls back just enough to look at him, and Mama's head lifts with curiosity, maybe hope._ _

____

__“Your_ capucho rojo.” ___


End file.
